Issues in the planning and design of a bilingual (English–northern Sotho) explanatory dictionary for industrial electronics

Abstract

The focus of this article is the planning and design of a bilingual, explanatory dic-tionary for industrial electronics with a clearly delimited and very specific target user in mind. Since the number of lemmas to be treated in the dictionary is limited to 500, special care must be taken to select those lemmas that are relevant for both the purpose of the dictionary and the needs of the target user. It is indicated that the main consideration in the planning of the envisaged dic-tionary is user-friendliness, as dictated by the intended target users. In this article, a novel ap-proach to the semi-automatic selection of lemmas for inclusion in an LSP dictionary is described. The procedure that is used for the extraction of definitional information from an electronic corpus is also explained.

Keywords: lsp lexicography, dictionary planning, lemma selection, semi-automatic term extraction, definitional information, industrial elec-tronics, corpus-based lexicography